Have you ever tried beets? Does this vegetable grow in your area? Can you buy it in the store?
So, if you have (or can have) beets, but don’t know what can you make of it, just read my article.
Beetroot is an ordinary and absolutely habitual vegetable in my area, but there are countries which don’t know it. I won’t say you about all recipes, there are a lot of them (you cat eat it raw or boiled, make salads, different soups, snacks, drinks, for example kvass, and even desserts), I’ll show you only the most popular dishes, which you most likely try when you come in Belarus, Russia ot Ukraine.
Caution, beets are very high-calorie product!
The most easy variant is to make a raw salad with beet, cabbage, carrots, maybe apple or garlic, if you want, with sour cream or sunflower oil. The ingredients may vary. But I recommend fresh young beets for such salads. Now it’s spring already and raw beets are not so tasty, so I didn’t make this salad now.
Making boiled beet salads is a little harder (of course, you should boil the beets first).
A simple salad which my family loves is a beetroot salad with eggs, garlic and mayonnaise.
For this salad you need:
-
1 boiled beetroot;
-
a couple of boiled eggs;
-
1-3 pieces of garlic;
-
cheese (if you want);
-
mayonnaise.
The most famous salad from beets I think is vinaigrette. The recipe and ingredients may vary, only beetroot is necessary.
Namely because this variety of ingredients the word vinaigrette sometimes means “hash”, “all sorts of things,” “a mixture of dissimilar objects and concepts”.
So for preparing vinaigrette you shoul take:
-
2 large beets or 3 medium;
-
2 carrots;
-
3-4 medium potato;
-
5-6 pickled cucumbers;
-
boiled beanes or canned peas (about 250g);
-
high quality vegetable oil;
-
salt, pepper;
-
1 onion, sauerkraut, marinated mushrooms (if you like);
-
and no vinegar!
All ingredients which should be cut into cubes and all are mixed. Add salt, pepper and oil.
The next salad was one of the necessary salads for almost all tablefuls (ecpessially New Year party) together with Russian salad until recently, only last years it lost it popularity. It’s the herring in a fur coat.
For this salad you need
-
1 lightly salted herring;
-
2-4 potatos;
-
2-3 carrots;
-
2-3 Beets of medium size;
-
1 onion;
-
2-4 chicken eggs;
-
mayonnaise to taste.
- Boil potatoes and carrots (about 20-30 minutes, check the softness of vegetables with a knife or fork).
- Boil the beets separately (about 40-45 minutes, the cooking time depends on the size of the beets, we monitor the readiness).
- Cook hard-boiled eggs (about 10 minutes).
- Prepare the herring fillet, cut it.
- Chop the onion finely. If the onion is bitter, then you can scald it with boiling water.
- The dishes for this salad need to choose wide, with a flat bottom.
- Peel the potatoes, grate on a coarse grater.
- Peel the carrots, grate.
- Peel the eggs, chop finely (leave one egg for decoration).
- Make the salad:
1 layer - grated potatoes, greased with mayonnaise;
2 layer - herring;
3 layer - onion, mayonnaise.
4 layer - eggs, mayonnaise.
5 layer - carrots, mayonnaise.
6 layer - beets, mayonnaise.
- Mayonnaise should be well spread over the entire layer of beets. Decorate to your liking. Put herring under a fur coat in the refrigerator for 5-6 hours for impregnation.
And of course when you think about beets you can’t not remember the Borsch, the traditional Belarusian, Russian and Ukrainian soup. I won’t write it’s recipe. Each housewife will prepare it in her own manner. There are plenty of recipes, you can easily choose the one you like in Internet or ask for my help.
